This dates back to early 2003 but I just found it.

DEAR SIR / MADAM,

I AM GEORGE WALKER BUSH, SON OF THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH, AND CURRENTLY SERVING AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOU BECAUSE WE HAVE NOT MET NEITHER IN PERSON NOR BY CORRESPONDENCE. I CAME TO KNOW OF YOU IN MY SEARCH FOR A RELIABLE AND REPUTABLE PERSON TO HANDLE A VERY CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS TRANSACTION, WHICH INVOLVES THE TRANSFER OF A HUGE SUM OF MONEY TO AN ACCOUNT REQUIRING MAXIMUM CONFIDENCE.

I AM WRITING YOU IN ABSOLUTE CONFIDENCE PRIMARILY TO SEEK YOUR ASSISTANCE IN ACQUIRING OIL FUNDS THAT ARE PRESENTLY TRAPPED IN THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ. MY PARTNERS AND I SOLICIT YOUR ASSISTANCE IN COMPLETING A TRANSACTION BEGUN BY MY FATHER, WHO HAS LONG BEEN ACTIVELY ENGAGED IN THE EXTRACTION OF PETROLEUM IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND BRAVELY SERVED HIS COUNTRY AS DIRECTOR OF THE UNITED STATES CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.

more at The Register

Elizabeth Bear reads slush for Ideomancer. She tries really hard to inform the submitter why she passes on something. Sometimes they respond to this kind advice. Badly. Link.

Oh, many things going on here. Sarcasm Girl is applying to college. When I was a young sarcastic person the process was less hedged round with terror and paranoia than it is now–they start telling kids in 6th grade: “This is going to count for college, you know. Schools look at your grades. Schools look at your community service. Be afraid, be very afraid.” So Avocado, aka Younger Girl, is just moving into the earliest stages of College-Terror, whereas poor Sarcasm Girl is up to her hips in it (all while carrying a full course load with two AP classes). I suspect that actually being in college will be less stressful than getting into college. And in certain ways I think that applying to college is less stressful than dealing with all the agita about applying to college. Someone must be benefiting from all this–the prep course businesses, the Educational Testing Service, sadists everywhere. I don’t like it, but if you don’t play the game you don’t go to college. Ech.

Meanwhile, Avocado’s softball team won the city Middle School championship yesterday. First time for the team. Much rejoicing, and now she gets to focus on her math and science. Middle School is a crazy time: the kids are making all sorts of cognitive shifts, the hormones are surging, and their teachers are asking them to do things, get organized, be Citizens, while the number of things they can do and want to do multiplies. My job appears to be to say No on occasion, and try to make things happen in the meantime.

And here’s a cool thing: my friend Ellen Klages, author of The Green Glass Sea, a wonderful book about kids growing up at Los Alamos during WWII while their scientist-parents are inventing The Bomb, has a link up at her LJ to a video clip of a kid recieving his own piece of Trinitite, the green glass made by the original Trinity test. You write a book, you hope it turns out well, you hope people like it, but you so rarely get feedback from people you don’t know and probably never will know, about how your work affected them. Years ago a woman drove forty miles to meet me at a convention because she’d read a story of mine about a little old lady and an alien border; she worked with the elderly, she loved the story, and just wanted to tell me so. It’s weirdly humbling when you find that you’ve really grabbed someone that way; it’s what you want to do when you write, but it’s also, in the words of my children, awesome.

And finally, via Making Light, this really-o truly-o scary advertisement for a gun rack that will keep your shotgun right beside your bed. Aside from the general horrificness factor, I look at it and all I can think is that I’d have the worst bruises on my shins ever. Ow.

The guy in the photo? That’s Jason.

Jason Campbell all but grew up in our house—he and Adam, my son, met when they were eight and in Kung Fu together and hit it off. When he graduated from High School, Jason joined the Marine Corps and served as a Recon Marine. He’s home now, and going to college in California. But while he was in Iraq we adopted his company of Recon Marines. They’re back in Iraq, the guys of Bravo Company, and even if Jason isn’t with them, they’re still our marines.

So Adopt a Marine! How do you adopt a Marine? You email me and I send you an address. (My email is mcq@en.com) You get a box and fill it with cool stuff—magazines, books, video games (they’ve got all the consoles) DVDs, CDs, toys, time wasters, not very perishable food (chocolate and things that melt, alas, don’t ship well, although my box of vanilla wafers and jar of Nutella shipped just find, thank you. And apparently Nutella vanilla wafer sandwiches are pretty damn good. And Jason swears nothing keeps you awake on patrol like wasabi peas.)

When you have a box of stuff, you seal it up, take it to the post office, explain that it’s going to Iraq and fill out a custom’s form. (Keep track of what you put in the box, okay?) Then you send it off. It takes you a little time. And then you get to feel pretty good about yourself. And every time you see one of those stupid ‘Support The Troops’ yellow ribbons on the back of a car, you can have a moment of insufferable superiority knowing that you do a lot more than just buying a friggin magnet.

They guys aren’t so great at writing back. But I have it on reliable authority that the packages do make a difference. And the magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, and games that we send stay in the common room and lots and lots of people use them. More importantly, that rate of PTSD, depression and suicide in returning soldiers is incredibly high. No one can make up for the strain of separation from family and the rigors of deployment. But I can’t help but hope that a little sense that the world gives a flying fuck helps.

I don’t support the war. I do support the men and women who are fighting it, in what small way I can.

I’m doing my bit to try to move us up in Google page ranking and list numbers re: Ken’s comment on my post today. This is Terra Naomi’s big hit.

Surely one of us must have posted this one already. Maybe while I was loaded on VICODIN.

First off, I’d like to apologize to all you Brainiacs for not meeting my posting commitment for the past month. I had a killer flu that lasted for more than three weeks. Work life was way beyond fast-paced, leaving me listless and stupefied by mid-afternoons. Then, last week I ramped up a monster ear infection, which caused frequent pain-bursts throughout the left side of my face. In case I haven’t mentioned it before – Vicodin is our buddy.

I feel much better now, so my thoughts have naturally turned, with assistance from some recent posts here, to one of my favorite subjects:

Death.

This isn’t morbidity on my part.

…..Well, okay, fine. Actually it is. I take my impending doom personally.

I’ve adopted the sensible attitude that dying should be viewed as a potentially curable medical condition. I figure I have about a 25% chance of living long enough for some of the good life-prolonging treatments to become available. If I can put off the not-inevitable for another 30 or 50 years, I hope to persist until lift-off of the Nanotech Singularity, with its promise of functional immortality. I’m up for stem-cell transplants, telomere replacement, mitochondrial rejuvenation, cellular-level repairs, and other unforeseeable scientific breakthroughs in support of my ambition to avoid Shuffling Off to Buffalo.

As a non-proselytizing atheist, though, I do still have to contemplate the fact that sometimes Bad Things Happen to Good Rories. However, I don’t have much mainstream cultural structure to fall back on to ease the transition from Me to Meat. Most religions give you, and your loved ones, hope of an afterlife, usually one that’s a big boring party where you don’t ever have to go back to work the next morning or worry about the cost of vehicle insurance.

I hate attending funerals, but I recognize that for most people, they’re rituals that allow you to say your (semi)-final farewells to people, until you get re-united inside the Giant Light Bulb. They also serve as ways of proclaiming greater meaning to people’s lives and deaths. I seem to be permanently mired in the Existential struggle, so the whole concept of funerals is damn cold comfort to me when I lose somebody, and useless as a concept if I personally check out of the Harper Hotel.

So, I’ve put some thought into what I’d like to happen, post-Rory.

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In the paper this morning, the lead article in the Metro-State section was on the sentencing of Paul Ross Evans for leaving bombs at abortion clinics here in Austin. Evans got 40 years.

As part of the sentencing, the judge gave Evans a chance to explain himself.  After struggling to articulate his “beliefs” Evans finally said, “If I had to do it all over again, I would change everything about it.  I never meant for anyone, except for the abortionists, to get hurt.”

Oh, well, I feel so much better now.

Because when I go for my Pap smear, knowing that I might be killed by hundreds of nails being driven through my body by the blast of a propane tank, I will be comforted to know that I wasn’t the f****** target.

And I’m sure that the doctors, nurses, office workers, and cleaning staff who worked at that clinic also felt better upon hearing that Evans was only after the abortionists.  Gosh, all the wailing about, “He could have killed us all.”  I mean, he didn’t mean it.  Cry babies.

And now for another asshole who should have kept his mouth shut: Johnny Rotten (nee, Lydon). Yes, everyone’s favorite former Sex Pistol who didn’t die of an overdose after stabbing his girlfriend to death.

Mr. Lydon is now supposedly a “provocateur.”  Oh, please.  He’s a pissy little bitch.  The same as he was when he and his “band” were created by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. The Sex Pistols were every bit as manufactured as the Monkees.  And at least the Monkees had some talent.

Mr. Lydon’s recent foray into opinion comes from a recent issue of Spin Magazine:

“The Ramones to me were never really punk; they were closer to Status Quo,” he opines. “The record company wanted to shove us into that CBGB’s world of New York, but that’s a world of foolishness.”

And further into the interview:

“I never liked any of the Clash stuff, though,” he says. “And I never considered the Clash punk. Joe [Strummer] was alright. He was very sweet-natured. But he came from a different music background. He’d already tried the pub-band circuit, so he hopped onto punk.”

Where to begin?

Okay, let’s start with calling two of the most seminal bands from the punk era, “not really punk.”

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Each year in the first half of October over a hundred thousand people descend upon my city for the annual Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. I don’t know the statistics for this year, but in 2006 there were 700 balloons registered and when the wind is right, they float right overhead and land in the park behind my house.

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No one in this photograph exists. Not anymore.

Yet here they are. And I remember some of them even though I myself didn’t exist when the photo was taken.

There’s the grandmother I knew so well. And there beside her, in the plaid shirt, is the grandfather I never knew at all.

Yet as I look at the photo, I remember him too. Because even though this moment is long gone, here it is for me (and you) to see.

But the fact that you and I can see these people doesn’t mean that they currently exist. . . and we all know that. We recognize that this is a photographic image from the past, and that the moment it represents (as well as, in this case, everyone who participated in that moment) is gone.

We know how a camera works, and we know that the image a camera creates is not the moment itself. It is merely a representation of that moment. A memory.

Now consider your eye. Consider how the light reflecting off a loved one (or a rock, or a leaf, or a car on the freeway) enters your eye. Consider how that image is projected, upside-down, onto your retina.

Now consider how your optic nerve transmits the signals triggered by that image to your brain. Consider how that information spreads from neuron to neuron, over and over and over again, and how the vast wet computer in your skull flips the image so that you see it upright.

Consider then how still more webs of neurons in that vast wet computer process the image into your conscious knowledge of what it represents.

Consider then how still more webs of neurons determine what your reaction to the image should be, and how still more webs of neurons process and transmit the resulting commands through your nervous system to your muscles.

Consider how long that all takes.

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I wanted to share this with my fellow Brainiacs.

Virgin Galactic, a pioneer company with plans to commercialize space flight, recently released the architectural drawings for its spaceport, planned to be built in southern New Mexico. And man, is it beauteous. The article, by Eric Adams at Popular Science, is online here; for the slide show with different concept drawings for the spaceport, click the pic*.

You know, I have never gotten over my love affair with space travel. Yes, I know all of the arguments: space is vast and we are tiny; it’s dangerous out there; if God had meant for us to travel in space, Zie would have provided us with space suits. Still.

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*WordPress is now working! Yay!

“Talk about ‘the’ American idea is dangerous because it is often a precursor to, and an excuse for, the missionary impulse that sleeps lightly, when it sleeps at all, in many Americans.” George F. Will

We are a people who like to improve. We like to improve ourselves. Become a Better You. The Secret. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. We like to improve others. We want to save people from their own worst impulses. I’m not saying that we aren’t aware that this is a problematic impulse. We are a nation of people who are either people who lit out for the territories, like Huck Finn, or who are descended from those people who lit out for the territories. But we often got to the territories and tried to make them right.

Which is why I almost never actually admit that I don’t believe in God. On the rare occasions when I am with someone and we are discussing religion and they ask me point blank, what do I believe, I will answer honestly. There is often a flicker of surprise on someone’s face. People have asked me, if I don’t believe, what keeps me from committing crimes? Read More »

Yesterday I was explaining entropy to Sarcasm Girl. Started out with the Big Bang theory and went on from there, but finally told her: just think of our dining room table. No matter how much stuff I clear off of it, more appears. The table remains the dumping ground for everything in the house. Not just mail, but candy (after Spouse and YG have been out on a debauch), college catalogs, books, music moved from the piano to the table (for some reason Sarcasm Girl cannot play piano with the music on the rack), books, oddments of hardware, picture frames, bus passes, BART cards, hair brushes and innumerable scrunchies and hairbands, dog toys, newspapers, spare change… I find it, after a while, depressing; there are so many corners of the house in which this sort of clunky emphemera accumulates: stuff to be dealt with, or thrown out, or just put down until one can think of a better place for it. The girls’ rooms are full of it, as is the Spouse’s desk (and mine isn’t much better, but I hold fast to the excuse that after cleaning up after everyone else I don’t have the energy to tidy my own space). Read More »

She Who Is Awesome just now pointed me at a pic that she took in class today.

What is that thing she’s holding in her hand?

Extra points if you’ve ever held one yourself.

Automatic ‘A’ on the test if you’ve ever eaten one.

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We’ve done some visual illusions here in the past. Now I’d like to offer you an auditory illusion. It’s call the Shepard Tone, and is a carefully constructed sequence of notes that makes you think you’re hearing a sound that is endlessly ascending or endlessly descending. It’s actually transitioning back to an original tone every octave. When it’s skillfully cooked up, it’s really difficult to hear the transition. Here’s the Wiki entry, which leads to some samples.

The trigger for this post is that a software developer that hangs out at KVR has posted four plug-ins that help you construct these types of tones.

They have some examples on their web page of Shepard/Risset tones. I highly recommend that you listen to Vurt’s “52″ in the player on the web page. It’s the best-executed example of this illusion that I’ve heard so far. Vurt is a legend at KVR for many reasons, among them that he makes weirder sounds than any other sapient being on the planet. This is Vurtness at its best. Though not its strangest.

Here’s the link.

BTW – The Shepard Tone gets really, really annoying after awhile….

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So, I’m engaging in this pretty pointless but kinda understandable search to see what everyone is saying about the Yumper trailer. Understandable because a lot of people (over 700,000 on YouTube alone) have seen it and a lot of them think it’s really cool. But also pointless because others are pissed because the movie doesn’t match the book and a small minority who’ve never heard of the book still think the trailer looks (I kid you not) “Gay.”

Cory Doctorow was describing this phenomenon at VP last week. He called it the “Turd in the Punch Bowl” phenomenon. No matter how delicious the punch and how small the turd, you just can’t get the turd off your mind.

I won’t point you at raves or pans but I did run across this funny one by Liz Miller at The Daily Reel. There she says:

Oh, man. So it’s just another Friday night and I’m lounging with my best BFFs at the the latest fabulous Hollywood see-and-be-seen (don’t ask me where, please — I wouldn’t want to make you feel embarrassed). And we’re enjoying some light cocktails and hard drugs when the topic of conversation turns to, as always, “Who would win in a fight — Anakin Skywalker, Mace Windu, or Billy Elliott?”

It’s a pretty controversial topic of conversation, as we all know. After all, Mace Windu’s got that badass purple lightsaber, and Billy Elliott has those sweet dance moves, and Anakin Skywalker’s all pouty and sad… The debate wages on as usual for an hour or so, and then my friend Jill says, “Wait. Guys. What if they had the power of teleportation? What then?”

And we are just like, “Whoa.”

link